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OT: Drool fodder for CUDA devotees
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[Lance Bachelder] “This is the dilemma – stay Mac and always be relegated to sub-standard graphics cards, especially those from ATI. Or go Windows with CS6 and be able to use these incredible cards.”
Honestly, if you are shifting to Adobe, unless you need ProRes encoding, or want to run Smoke (as it stands), or have some other OS X exclusive requirement, I can’t see any good reason today to stick with OS X. I have my own bias for OS X, but I’m also not an editor. I have my own personal hangups with Windows, but if you are buying a workstation, it is hard to justify a Mac for Adobe CS6 under the current circumstances.
Maybe Apple will surprise us with a worthy successor to the Mac Pro this sumer, and maybe Intel and Microsoft’s shift to EFI will prompt NVIDIA and AMD to ship more Mac-friendly GPUs, but today those things aren’t true.
Like I said, I’m a big-time Mac bigot, but even I can’t justify choosing OS X and the currently available Mac hardware for running Adobe CS6.
Best,
Andy -
[Erik Mickelson] “The card is Pcie3. That’s the big deal. Twice the processing power of Pcie2.”
PCIe 3.0 is indeed a big deal, but it means double the effective bandwidth, not double the processing power.
[Erik Mickelson] “It will not matter the slots multiplier, you will not have to worry what slots are open.”
It would matter less compared to today’s constraints on a Mac Pro, but we don’t even know if the Mac Pro will have a successor, by any name, with slots of any kind.
[Erik Mickelson] “I don’t think anything can saturate a Pcie2 bus except for uncompressed footage.”
Uncompressed 10-bit 1080i29.97 is about 250 MB/sec, or half of one lane of PCIe 2.0. A 4x PCIe 2.0 slot would be saturated with 8 streams. The highest end GPUs can push past the bandwidth limits of PCIe 2.0 8x under load, but most GPUs do not. Putting lesser GPU cards in a 16x slot is for power requirements as much as it is for bandwidth.
[Erik Mickelson] “So put the raid on the x16 slot and the video card on a x8.”
You’d need some seriously fast storage to pull more than a PCIe 2.0 8x slot can support, not to mention an HBA with more than 8 lanes (and I’m not aware of any PCIe 2.0 16x HBAs).
Someday soon we’ll surely find ways to need all the bandwidth available in PCIe 3.0 16x and 8x slots (expansion chassis is the obvious application), but today, single cards of any sort will struggle to fill those pipes. That’s a great problem to have. In a couple years, when we have 12 Gbps SAS3, we’ll be glad to have PCIe 3.0 slots to saturate.
Then you can do all the stereoscopic 4K multi-cam you want!
Best,
Andy -
Hey there.
Be careful comparing Fermi cores to Kepler cores. It’s a different architecture so it’s not an apples and apples comparison.
Greg
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Indeed Apples have almost no place in this discussion Greg! 🙂
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Yes, it is a weird time to be a pro mac user. Since Premiere Pro CS 5.5 I have looking longingly at a custom built system from Puget Systems and this GTX 690 makes it seem like an even better solution.
I would love to see a speed comparison for CUDA on the GTX 690 vs the Tesla 2070 with Premiere Pro CS6. I know the TESLA still wins in memory so would likely blow the GTX out of the water, but I wonder about 448 CUDA cores to over 3000!
The thing is I still love Mac, and will probably want one for my regular computing even if I end up with a Windows Workstation as my editing and graphics station, which is of course another expense, but unless Mac does something surprising and makes and awesome new workstation with support for new NVIDIA CUDA cards I think a PC is likely in my future.
– Jonah Lee Walker
Video Editor, After Effects Artist
https://www.whaleofatale.net -
[Greg Estes] “Be careful comparing Fermi cores to Kepler cores. It’s a different architecture so it’s not an apples and apples comparison.”
Noted — thanks for the clarification!
For anyone who doesn’t recognize the name, Greg Estes is the marketing executive responsible for media markets for NVIDIA.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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